New Paladin Updates

08Apr

One thing that you find most commonly when you take a look at existing guides on how to play your paladin is that almost without exception you see the line “spec Retribution until level 30 and then respec into Protection”. The only real variation you see in that is an occasional suggestion to stick with Retribution until level 40.

There is certainly nothing wrong with doing this, and as I am sure most of them have more experience with the paladin than I do it is probably quite sound advice. But, you don’t have to do it simply because someone told you to.

You can look back at my blog and see the information I posted in relation to Palasyn (Blood Elf Paladin 45) to see how I went about playing him, and you can see that I started doing AoE grinding with him at around level 8. While I played him though, there were two things that I did that I wished I had not:

1) I got him several runs through the SM instance(s) to power level him from 20 to 30.

2) I followed the advice mentioned above and started out as Ret rather than Prot.

Fixing These Problems
My wife decided last week that she is tired of being ganked on our PvP server and rerolled a new paladin on a Normal server, and because her friend and long-time questing partner refused to change servers, I decided I would be the one to move over with her. Since I have had such fun playing Palasyn, I decided to go ahead and reroll a paladin on the new server as well.

Doing this allowed me to solve several of the issues I have been facing:

Power Leveling via “Run Throughs”

Unnecessary Respecs

Palasyn’s Name

Power Leveling via “Run Throughs” – Since we moved to a new server where we basically have no contacts, getting ran through instances is pretty well out of the question unless we want to farm ore to sell on the auction house until we can afford to buy them. And since that method isn’t my style, it’s not going to happen.

Unnecessary Respecs – This time around I said to myself, “why bother losing that first, shiny gold piece on a respec that I really do not need?” And the answer that I came up with was that I don’t need to. So this time around I dove directly into the Prot tree and have no intention of ever getting out.

Palasyn’s Name – As I have mentioned before, I did not intend to play with Palasyn when I initially made him, so his name is pretty lame and often confusing when in groups with other paladins. Since we rerolled new characters instead of transferring our existing characters I did not have to stick with Palasyn as my name. My new paladin’s name is Lexington (Blood Elf Paladin 25), which is my preferred name for paladins when playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Plans for the Future
I am short on time today, so this is where I will leave off for now. I want to let you know though, that the next few posts are going to go into more detail about how I am leveling Lexington on a fresh server. I have installed a new addon called MultiShot which auto-captures screenshots for me whenever I gain a level, reach an achievement, or kill a boss (I found out about it here). With the use of this addon, I plan to put together slide shows of Lexington’s leveling career so that you can see where I was each time I gained a level, as well as showing off his various achievements as he obtains them.

If you would like to check out a slideshow of Lexington’s progress so far, please have a look: